What to Expect from Your First Piano Lesson
Many people believe that learning piano is a long, arduous process with little reward until many years in. They believe that piano lessons for beginners aren’t useful until they take enough of them to become intermediate players. They are discouraged by the seemingly daunting and time-consuming task of learning piano, and decide to just not start at all.
I’m here to tell you that it is all false.
Even one piano lesson can benefit your understanding of and connection to music.
Pre-Trial: Before your first piANO LESSON
We asked all our students how they felt before coming in to their first trial piano lesson, and overwhelmingly the answer was that that they were scared and anxious. They were wondering if they were even good enough to play an instrument, if they even had enough musical sense to be able to learn how to play, and if they would embarrass themselves in front of a teacher with their lack of knowledge.
The truth is, starting to learn the piano as an adult can be scary! As a kid, you are expected not to know things, and constantly be in a state of learning. But as an adult, you are expected to know things already, and going back to the beginner’s mind to learn a new skill is definitely a little terrifying.
We also surveyed how students felt after their first piano lesson, and the overwhelming answer then was exhilarated, excited, and renewed. At our music school near Somerville, it is our job as teachers to make students feel like they have a clear strategy and roadmap of how to accomplish the task of learning the piano. We want students to feel like their practice days aren’t annoying and time-consuming, but more of a time in their day or week where they can distract themselves from the difficulty of their lives and instead focus on something that makes them feel accomplished.
Piano lessons, and piano practice in between lessons, is something that should be fun, and your instructor does their very best to make it so.
What do you do at your First piano Lesson?
At Loudlands Music Lab, your first lesson is a trial lesson in which you and your instructor (me) sit down and talk about your musical experience. Have you played an instrument before? What kind of music do you like to listen to? When you close your eyes and visualize yourself playing the piano, what music are you hearing?
All these questions help your piano instructor cater your lesson to your experience level as well as your musical goals.
Lessons for Piano Players with previous experience
If you have more experience, and just want to brush up on some topics as it has been a while since your fingers have touched the 88 keys, then we’ll breeze through the basics and get you playing and seeing what you remember as fast as possible. Often, you remember a lot more than you thought! This is usually accomplished by asking you to play a couple of scales and chords and play a simple song (the go-to is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) from sheet music to see your reading level.
beginner piano lessons
If you have no experience, we’ll start with keyboard layout, the first of the major scales, and some basic sheet music. We’ll even try to get you to play your first song! There’s no expectation for previous musical experience, so you can come to as a complete novice and take beginner piano lessons for adults without judgement.
Learning music theory
Although it does take a few lessons to get into the groove of both teaching and learning, as getting to know each other will facilitate a far better teacher-student relationship, even one lesson can help you learn more about music. It is impossible for any teacher to teach piano without teaching at least some music theory, and I always teach people enough music theory to start to understand the music they are listening to.
Every student I have ever had, from students who stayed with me for years to students who only took one or two lessons, told me that after taking a few piano lessons, they started to understand, and therefore gain more enjoyment out of, the music they listened to on a daily basis. It helped them to find more music that they enjoyed as they figured out what they liked in the music they like and were better able to search for more of it.
After a Few Piano Lessons In…
Though the basics of playing piano are the same regardless of the style of piano you want to play, after two or three lessons we will start to customize your piano lessons to more efficiently reach your musical goals.
Roughly, there are four styles of music for the piano. They absolutely do intersect with each other, and knowledge gained from one can be useful in another, and no style prevents you from learning another one. Still, time is limited, and therefore I believe it is useful to start somewhere with a clear goal in mind and adapt as time goes on. The four styles are:
· Classical music
· Jazz
· Rock
· Playing while singing
Learning Classical Music
To learn classical piano, the first and most important skill to be learned is to read sheet music. Though it is essential for all students to be able to read sheet music, classical piano demands a higher level of fluency than any other style. So more time will be spent becoming comfortable with sheet music.
Luckily, learning to read sheet music at that level is not terribly boring and annoying. At first, we will just use music apps and fun games to read one note at a time until it is almost as automatic as reading English. Then, we will institute a regimen consisting of one challenging piece, which will take a few weeks to a couple months of work, along with a weekly easy piece to learn that you can more or less sight-read. This accomplishes two things:
One, you begin to have a repertoire of common melodies that you can play, and who doesn’t want to show off their new skills right away? And two, we will steadily increase your abilities to play and understand how to tackle new piano pieces without your instructor so that you can play really anything you want, as long as you can find the sheet music (which I will also assist you in doing).
How to learn Jazz piano
Learning Jazz music takes learning how to improvise. Learning how to improvise takes learning just a few scales (so that you know which notes to choose from) and a lot, and I mean a lot, of exploration.
In my experience, I cannot teach you how to improvise. I can give you a little guidance, tell you to try this or that strategy, or play a few music improv games such as call-and-response. Mostly, learning how to improvise is just exploratory. You learn it yourself by playing and playing until you find what sounds good to you and are able to replicate it accurately.
Don’t worry, improvising is fun the whole time, from your first steps to advanced jazz cat level! Improvising is the best way to reach flow state, a feeling in which you are entirely immersed in an activity, and is immensely beneficial to your mental health, as well as feeling quite amazing.
First, we improvise over simple backing tracks in lessons, and choose a few backing tracks to improvise over for you daily practices. Then, once you feel a little more comfortable, we learn how to play a few simple jazz standards (the name for songs in jazz). And faster than you realize, you are jamming along with the best of them and are able to play all the songs you love. Learning to play Jazz piano near Somerville is a more exhilarating experience than you may expect.
How to play Rock music on the piano
Learning how to play rock music is similar to Jazz, just slightly different in application. The music theory behind rock is simpler than it is in jazz, so it does not require as much knowledge to be able to effectively play.
Learning how to play this style of music in piano lessons is as simple as learning a few scales, a few chords, and going in and just learning your favorite songs. We start simple in our initial piano lessons in Boston, and get more complicated as time goes on.
I find that it is still essential to learn some sheet music. It is difficult for anyone, and beginner piano players especially, to figure out a melody by ear. Imagine that you are trying to play your favorite song, and you pick out the melody in the first line of the first verse. It takes you a few minutes. Then you try to pick out the melody in the second line. You finally figure it out, but then, when you go back and try to connect the first and second line, you’ve forgotten the first!
That’s why its useful to be able to read sheet music. If you just read the melody off sheet music, which is not nearly as complicated as the whole song, and then add in the accompaniment with your chord and theory knowledge, the whole process becomes much, much easier.
Sooner than you think, you’ll be jamming along with all your favorite songs, and will become able to learn songs on the piano by yourself.
Playing Piano and Singing at once
This style of playing is the most different from the other styles in the skills that it requires. You have to be able to do a whole second task along with the already coordination-requiring task of playing piano!
To solve this problem, I assign an interesting music homework assignment – play piano while watching tv/reading. Basically, the second activity must be anything that requires speaking, or speech recognition. This helps in separating the part of the brain needed to move (playing piano) from the one that is needed to understand and produce speech (which, unless you are singing random sounds, is usually necessary to sing lyrics). In my experience, this is the fastest way to learn how to play piano and sing at the same time, which is something many beginner piano players struggle with.
The piano skills required to do this are actually simpler than the other styles. It is difficult, if not impossible, to play complicated music and sing complicated music at the same time. We are human, and the brain can really only focus on one difficult task at a time. And as speech, and therefore singing, requires quite a bit of brain power, the piano playing part has to be more or less automatic.
This style actually requires the least amount of sheet music fluency. All you really need to know is a few scales and chords, as well as some varied strategies of playing chords (so that all your songs don’t sound the same), and you’ll be able to start accompanying your singing effectively very quickly.
Of course, it is much easier to accurately reproduce a song identically to the original if you can read sheet music and just look it up. But, you can still get pretty close (and sound great!) just from knowing these simple skills.
Sign up for piano lessons near somerville, ma
Obviously, the benefits of learning piano through piano lessons increase the more lessons you take, but it is still enormously useful to take one or a few piano lessons with an instructor. If you are a complete beginner and don’t know where to start, your piano instructor can help you organize and create a learning plan that you can then follow without your teacher (though I do recommend a few lessons, just to make sure you are physically sitting correctly at the piano and holding your hands correctly, as that will prevent injury as well as speed up the learning process). If you already know a little bit about music, but feel like you have plateaued and want a little guidance on how to proceed, your piano teacher can help you find a way to move forward and improve again. Beat your musical plateau with piano lessons for professional musicians at our Great Boston music school!
If you are interested in taking piano lessons near Somerville, Cambridge, or wherever else in the Boston area you’re from, there really is no downside to trying it out! At Loudlands Music Lab, our trial lessons are always steeply discounted, so why not take advantage of a great deal and pick up a new skill or improve on an old one!
